Is It Time To Invest In Your Business?

Business Confidence Surges As Firms Look To The New Year

Britain’s businesses are increasingly confident that they will perform well in the coming year, as the economic crunch which was predicted to take place immediately after the EU referendum has not yet materialised. Many firms are now looking to invest in their businesses in 2017.

A survey by Lloyds banking group found that 37% of UK firms expected business prospects to improve, the strongest figure since the referendum back in June. The firms also expected the wider economy to improve, with 47% upbeat about the economy and only 13% taking a negative view.

Finance chiefs ‘more optimistic’

At the same time, UK finance chiefs have also become more optimistic about the future, even though uncertainty over Brexit is now widely viewed as the “new norm” for most businesses.

A survey by Deloitte found that 27% of finance directors whom the accountancy firm questioned in the fourth quarter of 2016 were more optimistic, helped by better GDP growth. This was compared to just 16% in the third quarter of the year.

In the wake of the referendum vote in late June, optimism dropped to the lowest level since the global financial crisis. Finance officers battened down the hatches, pulling back on investment and spending.

However, since then the UK economy has proved more resilient than expected and any talk of the country falling into recession has abated.

Time to invest?

As a result, many firms may now be looking to invest in their business, as they seek to expand in the new year or provide a cash injection into the business.

One of the perennial problems facing small firms is that of cash flow and having enough liquidity in the business to carry out day-to-day operations as well as financing assets for future growth. But there are now many more options available to small businesses to help them achieve their business objectives without stretching their cash resources too thin.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, is asset finance, where a new asset deemed essential to the business can be acquired using some form of asset finance from an accredited asset finance broker.

Anglo Scottish is one of a number of long established and reliable asset finance brokers which specialise in providing a range of capital finance solutions for businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK.

A portfolio of relationships with major funding providers allows Anglo Scottish to search the market place for the most suitable funding solution for its business clients – at the cheapest rate available, without tying up capital reserves.

Used in this way, asset finance allows a business to preserve capital and generate income from its assets while paying for them over a certain amount of time.

At the same time, that all important cash flow is protected and the transaction, in most cases, is very tax efficient. Funding options over periods from one to seven years are available.

What type of assets can be financed in this way?

Asset finance can be used to fund a whole variety of asset classes that may be essential to the future financial health and continued profitability of the business.

For example, a specialist finance broker, like Anglo Scottish, can, and regularly does, provide funding for a number of different asset classes:

Agriculture

Aviation

Cars and vans

Commercial transportation

Healthcare

Manufacturing plant and machinery

Marine

Materials handling and construction

Non-prime sector

Professional sector

Public sector

Renewable energy

Technology

Commercial property

What are the benefits?

For business of all sizes, there are multiple benefits in using asset finance solutions to fund their asset purchases. These include:

Significant tax benefits as payments are fully tax deductible.

Low, fixed payments allow easy budgeting throughout the term of the finance period.

Spreading the cost of the purchase in line with the return on investment.

Making capital work harder – rather than sinking valuable cash into depreciating assets, it can be deployed elsewhere for higher returns.

Through its flexible nature, asset finance allows the business to determine the term, frequency of payments, while the solution can be upgraded or changed throughout.

Obsolescence can be managed more readily and assets refreshed more strategically rather than facing unbudgeted, large write offs.

Investment decisions can be made based upon the needs of the business and not limited by constrained budgets.

Asset finance also allows dependency on the firm’s primary funders to be reduced, thus protecting credit lines and leaving them unaffected.

The cost of VAT can be spread across the term of the finance agreement, so that it is paid in instalments rather than as a lump sum up-front – with the exception of hire purchase and lease purchase agreements

Turnkey funding can be employed to build all the business’s costs into the asset finance agreement to maximize the benefits still further.

For further information or for a quote for your next project, contact Anglo Scottish and our team will be delighted to help.